Archive for the ‘moon’ Category

The stimulus cost taxpeyers $787 billion. It was rushed through congress to create jobs. Few in congress even admitted to reading its 1,000 plus pages. The stimulus authorized the AIG bonus payments that nearly eveyone since saw as “outrage.”

Thanks to Chris Dodd and Tim Geithner apparently….

Now the president said he will use that anger and outrage that he himslf and congress fueled to sell more spending: his budget. The $3.6 trillion budget.

Did we get jobs from the stimulus or will we?

Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press said it pretty well today, “If space exploration were conducted like the job forecasts under the government’s new stimulus law, man surely would have missed the moon.”

CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer
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WASHINGTON – If space exploration were conducted like the job forecasts under the government’s new stimulus law, man surely would have missed the moon. But this isn’t rocket science.

No promise from President Barack Obama is more important to the wounded economy than his vow to save or create some 3.5 million jobs in two years. In support of that bottom line, the government even tells states how many jobs they can expect to see from the spending and tax cuts.

But precise trajectories are impossible to plot and even approximations can be wildly off, as the authors of these forecasts acknowledge, usually more readily than the policymakers who use them to promote the plan.

Flip through the stacks of economic analyses underpinning the stimulus plan and you find a lot of throat-clearing qualifications and angst:

–“Very uncertain.”

–“Difficult to distinguish among alternative estimates.”

–“We confess to considerable uncertainty.”

–“Subject to substantial margins of error.”

In other words, who really knows?

Economic modeling may prove to be a haywire navigational device in this crisis.

“Large fiscal stimulus is rarely attempted,” Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, told lawmakers. “For those reasons, some economists remain skeptical that there will be any significant effects, while others expect very large ones.”

Zero to nirvana? Even for economists, who routinely differ among themselves, that’s a range beyond the norm.